Japanese Text Support

the game im making currently is made with japanese based erm im not exactly sure whatto call ti.. But the Game has alot of japanese stuff in it, So im going to make a japanese version of the game... Well if theres Japanese Text Suport availbe for GM.
So Does GM support Japanes characters?(only as texted language. Or would i have to get an exention of sorts. If so how would i implement the japanese text into the game?
ID hope to have it as easy as just translating the text and altering the graphics from english to japanese...

If you poke around in the extending forum, there's been a lot of discussion of people trying to figure out ways to get unicode or asian characters in text to work. Last I checked, there's still no solution.

I do know at least one person who claimed to have made it work via the "upload graphics for every character" angle. The problem is that that's a LOT of graphics... there are an awful lot of characters in Japanese! I did it myself for Russian once, but their character set is much smaller and could be implemented as a custom font. You can't do that with Japanese. You'd need to design a whole set of code to draw images manually.

If you poke around in the extending forum, there's been a lot of discussion of people trying to figure out ways to get unicode or asian characters in text to work. Last I checked, there's still no solution.

I do know at least one person who claimed to have made it work via the "upload graphics for every character" angle. The problem is that that's a LOT of graphics... there are an awful lot of characters in Japanese! I did it myself for Russian once, but their character set is much smaller and could be implemented as a custom font. You can't do that with Japanese. You'd need to design a whole set of code to draw images manually.

What about loading a font that has japanese characters in it erm, i mean like i paste japanese text and the game shows that text? is that possilbe?

for exampleEnglish version: Having a good day?Japanese Version: は元気ですかOを?*(o no genki desu ka)

If you poke around in the extending forum, there's been a lot of discussion of people trying to figure out ways to get unicode or asian characters in text to work. Last I checked, there's still no solution.

I do know at least one person who claimed to have made it work via the "upload graphics for every character" angle. The problem is that that's a LOT of graphics... there are an awful lot of characters in Japanese! I did it myself for Russian once, but their character set is much smaller and could be implemented as a custom font. You can't do that with Japanese. You'd need to design a whole set of code to draw images manually.

What about loading a font that has japanese characters in it erm, i mean like i paste japanese text and the game shows that text? is that possilbe?

for exampleEnglish version: Having a good day?Japanese Version: は元気ですかOを?*(o no genki desu ka)

P.S. You could always just type the Japanese into images and use those (although that's really resource heavy)P.P.S. You formatted the Japanese wrong (what is that ha/wa doing in the front, along with the Oを at the end?)

Actually this is something I'd really love to see in a future version of GM.Someone should get on to Mike about it.Unicode/Asian character support would be very handy for making titles multilingual & porting for sale to the likes of Japan...indeed, Unicode support is more important/potentially useful now with the iPhone porting & fact that iPhone is doing well in Japan - could be a real nice market to tap.

As hpapillon pointed out, Russian is "doable" because it has a reasonable character set...but Japanese & Chinese are not - because of the amount of Kanji characters...(2000-3000 Kanji characters are in common use in Japan.)

Imo, your best bet would be 1) create your game in English...2) get a Japanese person to translate into Japanese...3) use single "pics" of complete paragraphs of the Japanese text in-game rather than an actual font set.

If you try to avoid using kanji all together your game will read very stupidly... like a very young kids book.

The way that some games would do it would be to have full font sets for hiragana & katakana & then see what kanji are actually used in the game script & only include those that are needed as special characters... (unless your game has a ton of text, the number of kanji used could be quite small - very likely under 100, possibly under 50)... alotta time/effort required for this solution tho.

(Also worth noting that PC isn't very popular at all as a games platform in Japan/for Japanese...& that Japan already has *plenty* of "titillating" game titles...so you're probably wasting your time with a Japanese version anyway.)

Edited by dadio, 06 October 2010 - 06:25 AM.

0

Captain Toof Vs Da Clone Tentacles

"This is atrocious game design" - "I died 236 freaking times" - "Hundreds of deaths were caused by bad mechanics" - "I don't recommend this game to anyone unless you love games that make you die over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over." - "Just as fun as being m******d by a Tentacle"

Actually this is something I'd really love to see in a future version of GM.Someone should get on to Mike about it.Unicode/Asian character support would be very handy for making titles multilingual & porting for sale to the likes of Japan...indeed, Unicode support is more important/potentially useful now with the iPhone porting & fact that iPhone is doing well in Japan - could be a real nice market to tap.

As hpapillon pointed out, Russian is "doable" because it has a reasonable character set...but Japanese & Chinese are not - because of the amount of Kanji characters...(2000-3000 Kanji characters are in common use in Japan.)

Imo, your best bet would be 1) create your game in English...2) get a Japanese person to translate into Japanese...3) use single "pics" of complete paragraphs of the Japanese text in-game rather than an actual font set.

If you try to avoid using kanji all together your game will read very stupidly... like a very young kids book.

The way that some games would do it would be to have full font sets for hiragana & katakana & then see what kanji are actually used in the game script & only include those that are needed as special characters... (unless your game has a ton of text, the number of kanji used could be quite small - very likely under 100, possibly under 50)... alotta time/effort required for this solution tho.

(Also worth noting that PC isn't very popular at all as a games platform in Japan/for Japanese...& that Japan already has *plenty* of "titillating" game titles...so you're probably wasting your time with a Japanese version anyway.)

There is the so called 1800 Daily use Kanji, and some 360+Katakana and Mirroring hirigana character sets. Anything in japanese can be writin in kana or hiri so kanji would be completely unessiary(think of it like... The Ampersand(&) symbol and the Word And, the Ampersand would be like Kanji, and the word And would be like writing it in katakana)

This kinda solves my question, i guess my game wont be translateble without serious amounts of work.

There is the so called 1800 Daily use Kanji, and some 360+Katakana and Mirroring hirigana character sets. Anything in japanese can be writin in kana or hiri so kanji would be completely unessiary

Although it is technically possible to write Japanese solely in Hiragana and Katakana, as I understand it the Japanese themselves have largely two associations with language that uses only those two character sets. They're used either to indicate a heavy foreign accent or to represent children's talk. In other words, you may get away with it once or twice for comic relief, but it would be tiresome if you maintain that style all the way.

If you don't understand the problem: it is muts la-ik ryting out yu-ur lengwits foneticalee.

This doesn't seem like something that helps many users. I'm not saying its a bad thing, just that it doesn't seem that useful to lots of users.

Not useful to a lot of users? There are 127 million people living in video game country Japan!

It's not just support for Japanese we need, but support for Unicode. This would open the door to character sets in any language. You're basically ruling out pretty much all of Asia by saying it shouldn't be a priority.

Exactly.
This also reminds me of something I thought of a long while ago...
I'm guessing that Mark using Delphi was the reason for no Unicode support...
but I'm wondering if multilingual versions *of GameMaker itself* is something that YoYo have given thought to?

I've always felt that a Japanese language version of GameMaker in particular would be a huge hit. The "game hack" community in Japan (pumping out original SMW levels & heavily modding old NES games etc.) is pretty active... & games in general are *mega-popular* there...
but most Japanese don't have a very good grasp of English, so GM would be out of reach.
I think that a Japanese GM would go down a real treat in Japan (& that we'd see some truly stunning games...)

High population, very low piracy rate, probably highest game interest in the world - seems to me that it would be a good move by YoYo to tap into this (potentially massive) market.

(I realize there's more to it than "Woohoo! Let's do it!" - GML is English based & would still offer a hurdle to potential Japanese devvers... & there would be expenses invloved in general support for a Japanese version - but still, something worth thinking about.)

0

Captain Toof Vs Da Clone Tentacles

"This is atrocious game design" - "I died 236 freaking times" - "Hundreds of deaths were caused by bad mechanics" - "I don't recommend this game to anyone unless you love games that make you die over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over." - "Just as fun as being m******d by a Tentacle"

Exactly.This also reminds me of something I thought of a long while ago...I'm guessing that Mark using Delphi was the reason for no Unicode support...but I'm wondering if multilingual versions *of GameMaker itself* is something that YoYo have given thought to?

I've always felt that a Japanese language version of GameMaker in particular would be a huge hit. The "game hack" community in Japan (pumping out original SMW levels & heavily modding old NES games etc.) is pretty active... & games in general are *mega-popular* there...but most Japanese don't have a very good grasp of English, so GM would be out of reach. I think that a Japanese GM would go down a real treat in Japan (& that we'd see some truly stunning games...)

High population, very low piracy rate, probably highest game interest in the world - seems to me that it would be a good move by YoYo to tap into this (potentially massive) market.

(I realize there's more to it than "Woohoo! Let's do it!" - GML is English based & would still offer a hurdle to potential Japanese devvers... & there would be expenses invloved in general support for a Japanese version - but still, something worth thinking about.)

Foreign languages (such as Japanese) apparently were possible in older versions of Game Maker, actually. From the look of it, saving a game maker source file and creating an executable properly required having the right character encoding in effect on Game Maker. Then running the executable resulted in the language being displayed properly (provided the right character encoding was in effect). I know in GM 4.3 I was able to display Japanese characters at least.

Not sure what changed since then, but I know foreign character sets are not supported as early as GM 7.

It might be possible to bypass the issue somewhat trivially by editing the executable, though I am not familiar with Game Maker enough to say much. This solution as I am thinking of it, if it did work, would limit you to a specific code page since Game Maker apparently does not support Unicode.

In GM6-7 there was support for Japanese characters in the script editor only, and there was a program from the Japanese community that could generate a font sprite set for the characters- and scripts that could handle drawing them. I haven't tested them since so unsure if it still works, I know that unicode support was removed from the script editor as of GM8.

Some technical background: currently GM uses the 'sprite font' approach, basically all the characters you want to print are pre-rendered to a texture, textured polygons are then used to place the characters.
The problem is that for a meaningfully large character set, the texture size gets stupidly high. You could never render unicode this way.

There are numerous other ways of drawing text. The choices for use in GM are limited by the fact its a realtime 3d rendering system and software based approaches like used in the text control that you're reading this off, won't really work.

There are also hardware-based approaches, I've spent some time to implement one myself. I see two obstacles to overcome before they're seen in gm: firstly none of them will will work on dx8, we're looking at least at dx9 with SM3 support. Secondly, these are pretty complex beasts, especially if you actually want to render unicode and not just unicode characters. From the growth of GM I've seen since version 4, I'd say its beyond the technical ability of the developers unless they blow a significant chunk of time and budget to do it. As its a want and not a need, they probably won't even think about it in the near future.

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Engineers are not programmers. Stop thinking that you can save a few bucks by writing code yourself instead of hiring a programmer. Your code sucks.

Some technical background: currently GM uses the 'sprite font' approach, basically all the characters you want to print are pre-rendered to a texture, textured polygons are then used to place the characters.

The problem is that for a meaningfully large character set, the texture size gets stupidly high. You could never render unicode this way.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the shortcut obvious? Rather than pre-rendering the entire character set to a texture, it should render the required characters directly from the installed or provided font at runtime.

It's not the only change in implementation they face - Unicode also needs to be supported for the dialog boxes, the file functions and for the code editor within Game Maker itself. That doesn't sound as too big a change to make however, since such functionality is supported by the underlying operating systems.

I speak for Windows and Apple OSes only here - I don't know how Unicode is dealt with on mobile devices such as the recently targeted PSP, if at all.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the shortcut obvious? Rather than pre-rendering the entire character set to a texture, it should render the required characters directly from the installed or provided font at runtime.

I don't understand what you mean. Render only a subset of characters to texture? That's what is currently being done. The constraint on using textures for fonts isn't disk space, its video memory and texture size limitations. There's only so many characters you can stick into a 1024x1024 texture, which is the biggest size I'd try to use on dx8 class hardware. You just can't stick japanese, chinese, korean, etc into this size.

I mean, its certainly doable to render subsets of a complete character set to a bunch of textures and then switch between them, but I don't think I've ever seen it done or would do that myself given the same problem. At that point it becomes more of a hack than a solution and it still consumes a buttload of vram. And yeah, before any of that happens, the entire thing needs to be compiled with unicode support - editor and runner both.

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Engineers are not programmers. Stop thinking that you can save a few bucks by writing code yourself instead of hiring a programmer. Your code sucks.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the shortcut obvious? Rather than pre-rendering the entire character set to a texture, it should render the required characters directly from the installed or provided font at runtime.

I don't understand what you mean. Render only a subset of characters to texture? That's what is currently being done.

No, what I understood from you is that the entire font is stored in a texture so that it contains all characters, and then in-game it is blitted from that character set texture to a texture that displays the actual text. Why not skip the pre-rendered full-font texture and draw directly on a texture using the original font?

Performance reasons, maybe, or the ability to ensure the font travels with the game. But it's not really a feasible solution with character sets that go beyond the ASCII limit.

Performance reasons, maybe, or the ability to ensure the font travels with the game.

Yes, mainly perf reasons. First and foremost, rendering anything in software and then putting it in a 3d scene requires constant VRAM access which in turn causes constant pipeline stalls. Secondly things get weird when you use native windows font rendering because of antialiasing and sub-pixel smoothing, accessibility, DPI scaling, etc.

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Engineers are not programmers. Stop thinking that you can save a few bucks by writing code yourself instead of hiring a programmer. Your code sucks.

I don't think a lack of built-in Kanji support would be a show-stopper for Japanese game authors. Having the whole GM UI support unicode so GM is translated into Japanese and the user can put Japanese names for their objects and rooms and sprites and making the GML editor support Unicode again would probably do the trick. If all that was done, people would be able to jury-rig kanji solutions such as the .net program mentioned above that can generate GML for displaying kanji.

As far as current Japanese support: Many games don't really need full kanji support. Only super text-intensive games like RPGs would need more than a few screenfuls of text. For the rest, saving those few screens full of text and onscreen bits of text like "Score", "Lives", "Hospital", etc as images will probably work just fine. A high scores list might be tougher, but a Kana solution would be OK since thats what most current games do. So, before you try to implement full kanji support make sure you really really do need it. Unfortunately I will need it for my game.

~~~ KANJI SPRITES ~~~

I made a quick test program in game maker that can randomly diplay any of 2048 kanji. It displays a whole screen full of them and each one randomly changes to another kanji every step at 712 frames per second. The whole thing took me about 20 minutes to write.

First I got a Heisig kanji list off the internet and pasted it into Babel Pad (substitute whatever unicode editor you prefer). I broke the list into lines of 16 characters each. Then I opened up the GIMP graphics editor, made a new image that is 56*16 wide by 56*128 tall (56 is the dimensions in pixels of a single square kanji sprite). I made my GIMP grid have 56x56 dimensions and turned on snap to grid. I drew 8 adjacent text boxes that filled the whole image in 16x16 sections. For the font I picked a square monospaced font that had all the kanji (MS PMincho). I changed the font size to 56 pixels and turned off hinting and antialiasing. I pasted 16-row sections of the kanji list from Babel Pad into each of the 8 text boxes. At that point I had the entire kanji list in 56x56 pixel squares in an image. I saved it as a PNG.

I opened up Game Maker and created a sprite. I clicked edit sprite, picked create from strip, found my PNG image, said 2048 (the number of kanji I had) for the number of images, 16 for images per row, 56 for image width and image height, and clicked OK. It thought for a minute and succeeded in making a kanji sprite with 2048 sub-images. Then I made an object for the kanji sprite. On create I set image_speed to 0. On step I set image_index to random(2048). I made a room with n by n grid, filled the room with kanji objects, set room speed to 712, showed FPS in the title bar, and clicked run.

The bottom line is, at least for my purposes on my machine, so far displaying Kanji is working fine.

The bottom line is, at least for my purposes on my machine, so far displaying Kanji is working fine.

Yes, you're fine if you stick to the trivial part. But you're not displaying Japanese yet, you're just displaying random subimages of a sprite. This isn't the challenge.

Now take a Japanese text and properly display that text in Game Maker using your custom bitmap font implementation, and then you'll find out where the problem is: Game Maker can't handle Unicode texts. If you want to create a solution in GML only, the best option you have is reading a Unicode text-file byte by byte and map the Unicode characters you get from there to the sub-images in your bitmap font. That is, if you know how they should be mapped at all.

I should also note that you have already spent anywhere between 24 to 32 MB of texture data, depending on how Game Maker stores its subimages. Using bitmapped fonts is fine for character sets that fit in the ASCII range, but is rather heavy on your memory resources for a fair few of the Eastern languages.

Yes, you're fine if you stick to the trivial part. But you're not displaying Japanese yet, you're just displaying random subimages of a sprite. This isn't the challenge.

Now take a Japanese text and properly display that text in Game Maker using your custom bitmap font implementation, and then you'll find out where the problem is: Game Maker can't handle Unicode texts. If you want to create a solution in GML only, the best option you have is reading a Unicode text-file byte by byte and map the Unicode characters you get from there to the sub-images in your bitmap font. That is, if you know how they should be mapped at all.

I should also note that you have already spent anywhere between 24 to 32 MB of texture data, depending on how Game Maker stores its subimages. Using bitmapped fonts is fine for character sets that fit in the ASCII range, but is rather heavy on your memory resources for a fair few of the Eastern languages.

In other programming languages at least parsing unicode and mapping it to image indexes isn't very hard. I should mention that someone in this thread has already posted a link to a program that does that. I don't need to read unicode for my game or I would write you an app.

I'm a bit concerned that a 500kb image showing 2048 kanji would turn into 24-32 MB worth of texture data. Is there a way I can verify what you are telling me?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edit:

OK I did some research into this texture data thing. Game maker says exactly what Smarty did right there at the bottom of the edit sprite window, 24MB. Game maker compresses the image when you save the program, but it must uncompress it when it runs. A 56x56 pixel font size is EXTREMELY huge though so you can easily make your kanji sprites take up 1/12 as much space by going with a normal 16x16 pixel screen font instead of 56x56.

I ran some more tests too. I ran EVGA Precision on a blank game and the blank game used the same amount of video memory as the kanji test. Then I looked at regular RAM (not video ram) usage. The blank took up 11MB, the kanji test took up 71MB. Just for fun I added another 36MB sprite data and ram usage went up to 170MB. Does this mean sprites are constantly swapping from ram into the video card, and if so maybe those pipeline stalls GearGOD was talking about are happening anyway?

I still don't know what I'm talking about and I doubt this all would help anybody besides clueless old me know what's going on in there but I figured I'd try to answer my own question since nobody else wanted to.

OK, so, has anyone here heard of the Dzongkha language, or Bhutanian? It consists of special unicode characters that can actually stack on top of each other. THAT cannot be duplicated in Game Maker with any ease at all, especially since the stacking is more complex and actually linked in a unique manner for certain characters. I have Game Maker 8.1 and was wondering, if it says it has "basic multi-language support", does it support this kind of language? And what is a character set anyway? I looked through the different ones, and they only show normal letters. I even used Microsoft Himalaya, a font which I am very sure contains the actual Dzongkhan alphabet. Then I tried copying the unicode alphabet as text, but when I drew it, it drew as question marks, the generic translation of unknown unicode characters into standard ASCII. And for the "SYMBOL" option in the font's character set, this just appeared as the question mark character would appear in that font.Again, is there any possible way of getting these characters into Game Maker 8.1?

I have had Japanese characters working in 8.1 & HTML5 (haven't tried GM8), I even made an extension: S.L.U.T (simple localised universal text), this was mainly for GUI.
You need to have the languages installed on your machine other wise you will get the unknown character square.

I have had Japanese characters working in 8.1 & HTML5 (haven't tried GM8), I even made an extension: S.L.U.T (simple localised universal text), this was mainly for GUI. You need to have the languages installed on your machine other wise you will get the unknown character square.

I checked out the extension in your blog; it's a pretty interesting concept. I suppose having the full vocabulary of language able to translate between just all 7 of those languages would be a feat, though.And there's still the problem of Japanese having several thousand kanji characters that are commonly used, aside from the basic hiragana and katakana. Adding Japanese support to the extension would no doubt increase the memory of a game quite a bit.

This doesn't seem like something that helps many users. I'm not saying its a bad thing, just that it doesn't seem that useful to lots of users.

Not useful to a lot of users? There are 127 million people living in video game country Japan!

It's not just support for Japanese we need, but support for Unicode. This would open the door to character sets in any language. You're basically ruling out pretty much all of Asia by saying it shouldn't be a priority.

But most Chinese and Japanese, especially given those that GM is aimed at are young and ambitious, already know English (unlike vice versa) - it's probably not as prohibitive for them to not be able to write in their native language as it may appear. I'm all for other languages being supported, but while there are still performance issues with GM, whose improvement benefits everyone, I think that should be the priority.

This doesn't seem like something that helps many users. I'm not saying its a bad thing, just that it doesn't seem that useful to lots of users.

Not useful to a lot of users? There are 127 million people living in video game country Japan!

It's not just support for Japanese we need, but support for Unicode. This would open the door to character sets in any language. You're basically ruling out pretty much all of Asia by saying it shouldn't be a priority.

But most Chinese and Japanese, especially given those that GM is aimed at are young and ambitious, already know English (unlike vice versa) - it's probably not as prohibitive for them to not be able to write in their native language as it may appear. I'm all for other languages being supported, but while there are still performance issues with GM, whose improvement benefits everyone, I think that should be the priority.

Japanese culture(and probably other Asian cultures) doesn't necessarily translate well to English. For example, if you want to translate Onii-chan and Onii-san, both mean "Big brother", but the -chan honorific makes it a cute way of addressing your big brother, -san being more general. I doubt "Big brother" would make much of an impact on Japanese players.Also, considering how Japan is pretty xenophobic, they generally wouldn't be compelled to make English games(big companies probably do, though not so much doujin devs AKA indie devs, which GM aims for).

I'd also like to see support for Unicode, not just for Japanese. Korean is another big game market that's probably even juicier than Japan, seeing as they (stereotypically?) love spending their time gaming on their PC and Samsung phones. It's probably one of the features that would be easiest to add to GameMaker (fairly trivial in openGL, most likely the same in DirectX).

We localised You Still Won't Make It to Spanish, French, and Dutch, but we were a bit disappointed that we couldn't get Russian, Korean and Japanese in there too.

In any case, I'm pretty sure the Japanese code in Romaji? I have a really hard time imagining a function like システムを読む(int 数); , and every major operating system in existence was developed by English speakers, so the API's are all in English. A mix of Japanese-writing and English-writing functions would look strange.

Japanese culture(and probably other Asian cultures) doesn't necessarily translate well to English.

It's not as different as you think. English is really one of the very few languages that has dumped hierarchical language for the most part (compare 'Do you want water John?' to 'Would you like some water Mr. Thompson?'), travel a bit south to Mexico and you'll get enough honorifics and grammar-formality conjugations to tear your hair out. And a close equivalent of -chan in the form of the diminutive conjugation. It's not so much the language but it's more of a cultural thing. Language reflects culture and many 'intimate' cultures consider us Anglos 'dry'... according to many of my Mexican friends, anyways. Which greatly annoyed me.

In any case, I'm pretty sure the Japanese code in Romaji? I have a really hard time imagining a function like システムを読む(int 数); , and every major operating system in existence was developed by English speakers, so the API's are all in English. A mix of Japanese-writing and English-writing functions would look strange.

Exactly.
This also reminds me of something I thought of a long while ago...
I'm guessing that Mark using Delphi was the reason for no Unicode support...
but I'm wondering if multilingual versions *of GameMaker itself* is something that YoYo have given thought to?

I've always felt that a Japanese language version of GameMaker in particular would be a huge hit. The "game hack" community in Japan (pumping out original SMW levels & heavily modding old NES games etc.) is pretty active... & games in general are *mega-popular* there...
but most Japanese don't have a very good grasp of English, so GM would be out of reach.
I think that a Japanese GM would go down a real treat in Japan (& that we'd see some truly stunning games...)

High population, very low piracy rate, probably highest game interest in the world - seems to me that it would be a good move by YoYo to tap into this (potentially massive) market.

(I realize there's more to it than "Woohoo! Let's do it!" - GML is English based & would still offer a hurdle to potential Japanese devvers... & there would be expenses invloved in general support for a Japanese version - but still, something worth thinking about.)

Actually most Japanese learn English in school, they just prefer their native tongue.

So, most Japanese people who are smart enough to use a computer, should grasp GM no problem.

Actually most Japanese learn English in school, they just prefer their native tongue.

So, most Japanese people who are smart enough to use a computer, should grasp GM no problem.

You do realise you're talking to someone who lived in Japan for 10 years of his life?

It's true that Japanese people learn English in school. However, if you actually meet any Japanese raised-in-Japan individual, he'll most likely be really insecure about his English level. In general the English abilities of Japan are not very good (to put it nicely). So, before you say they 'learn' English in school, I'd like to invite you to go to Japan and try to strike a conversation in English with a random passerby. If you're lucky, you'll get semi-decent Engrish.

Also, if you try to speak to them in English directly, without a proper greeting in Japanese, most of them will refuse conversation.

Probably because of the aforementioned low self-esteem regarding their English skills, not because they are offended or anything. If they do speak English they won't hesitate in showing it off and/or attempting to get more practice.

Actually most Japanese learn English in school, they just prefer their native tongue.

So, most Japanese people who are smart enough to use a computer, should grasp GM no problem.

You do realise you're talking to someone who lived in Japan for 10 years of his life?

It's true that Japanese people learn English in school. However, if you actually meet any Japanese raised-in-Japan individual, he'll most likely be really insecure about his English level. In general the English abilities of Japan are not very good (to put it nicely). So, before you say they 'learn' English in school, I'd like to invite you to go to Japan and try to strike a conversation in English with a random passerby. If you're lucky, you'll get semi-decent Engrish.

a random japanese passerby is not the average GM user. Typically GM-users are younger (more stress on internationality), higher educated & more international orientated (internet etc).

Anyway, lack of unicode support is annoying, @Yal, last I checked (start of this summer) you were still limited to a very small subset of unicode with only a small character set. However people have to realize that the way GM works -include an image of each letter for each font- will not work for unicode. GM has to revert back to the GM5 graphical/font engine for that.

I tried sticking some 日本語 in a game just to test the new functionality, I couldn't get the text to display in-game no matter how hard I tried (this was in 1.2.1130). Maybe it's because my project is old or something. True Unicode support would be nice.

@SPARKY07: Don't you realize the last post was over one year ago? Things have changed... for the better.